Vegan Mayonnaise Company Starts Growing Its Own Meat In Labs, Says It Will Get To Stores First (qz.com) 409
Chase Purdy reports via Quartz: The maker of vegan mayonnaise has been working on getting lab-made meat onto dinner tables everywhere. It's just that nobody knew about it. Hampton Creek -- a company that built its name on plant-based condiments and vegan-friendly cookie doughs -- today revealed that, for the last year, it has been secretly developing the technology necessary for producing lab-made meat and seafood, or as the industry likes to call it, "clean meat." Perhaps even more surprising is that Hampton Creek expects to beat its closest competitor to market by more than two years. Since it was founded in 2015, Memphis Meats has raised at least $3 million from five investors for the development of its meat products, according to Crunchbase. By contrast, Hampton Creek -- just a 20-mile drive from its Silicon Valley rival -- has raised more than $120 million since 2011. It's one of Silicon Valley's unicorns -- a company that has a valuation that exceeds $1 billion.
Those Dirty Tleilaxu... (Score:4, Funny)
Growing meat in their Axlotl tanks......
The Gholas... They're made of meat!
Re:Those Dirty Tleilaxu... (Score:4, Funny)
You mean it slig meat, a half slug half pig creature that fed on garbage and body parts.
I remember the books saying it was thought as the tastiest meat in the known universe (except no one but the tleilaxu knew what sligs were or what they fed on).
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I'm not as smart as I thought. Forgot about the sligs.
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I'm not as smart as I thought. Forgot about the sligs.
Don't feel bad, I thought sligs was "The beer that made Milwaukee famous."
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Growing meat in their Axlotl tanks......
The Gholas... They're made of meat!
More like laying eggs. Real mayonnaise is eggs and vegetable oil with a touch of vinegar and seasonings.
So "vege" mayonnaise could possibly be mayonnaise without eggs. No thank you, I will stick with old school. It is comparable to people eating margarine instead of butter because butter contains cholesterol. Well, guess what? Your body will produce cholesterol with the overdose of margarine you may feed yourself although there is none in the intake. I eat butter. Just control your doses and you will be al
Re:Those Dirty Tleilaxu... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Those Dirty Tleilaxu... (Score:4, Funny)
roughly 50% of chicks that are born are male, and they are useless to the egg industry, so they are killed usually by being ground up alive or by being suffocated using carbon dioxide, which is fairly slow and unpleasant process.
Third wave feminists are sponsoring research to see if the process can scale up to include human males.
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If you're going to be snarky, at least be accurate. The Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM) was second-wave.
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Want to know if someone's a vegan?
Don't worry, they'll tell you
What's the point... (Score:2, Insightful)
...when you have perfectly good animals that are already made out of food?
Re:What's the point... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, but they're a tiny bit labor and resource intensive. With lab grown meat, you might be able to grow yer own on the kitchen counter top.
Re:What's the point... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but they're a tiny bit labor and resource intensive. With lab grown meat, you might be able to grow yer own on the kitchen counter top.
But then it turns out that the $300 meat machine you bought could've just been replaced by hand squeezing the meat packs you buy.
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They are actually losing money on that $300 press. A guy called AvE took one apart and it's massively over-engineered and incredibly expensive. He estimated at least $1000 worth of parts in it.
It's just a way to hook you into the subscriptions, which start at $40/week. If you subscribe for six months the thing has paid for itself. It's basically just a shiny toy to keep you paying for their incredibly over-priced pressed fruit.
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Re:What's the point... (Score:5, Interesting)
With vat-grown meat, we can also avoid the methane emissions from cows that contribute to AGW.
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emissions from cows that contribute to AGW
shouldnt that be (B)ovinomorphic GW?
Re:What's the point... (Score:5, Informative)
The "A" stands for "anthropogenic" (man-made), not "anthropomorphic" (man-shaped). So the analogous word you want is "bovogenic" (cow-made).
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"Not exactly, methane is much more potent than CO2 in terms of warning potential. "
It also breaks down much faster, so no real net difference in greenhouse potential.
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You have clearly never heard of Biovita steaks.
Go read The Incal comic series, and come back later.
https://www.amazon.com/Orphan-... [amazon.com]
In a nutshell, their main selling feature is that you have to kill the steaks yourself, and they can be quite deadly.
Re:What's the point... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, it could eventually get cheaper to grow meat rather than raise the animals. It could also have implication for places were it is inconvenient to raise animals. Think in the polar region or the desert. Also, raising animal is not environmentally friendly and my not scale to a 10 billion human population at US consumption rate.
Some people object to eating animal products (7+ million in the us, 350+ million in the world) but may not object to grown meat which could be a trillion dollar industry in itself.
Re:What's the point... (Score:5, Insightful)
I do not object, per se, to eating animals. Animals are yummy, and it's not my fault. However, the very instant a passable, affordable, non-animal meat product becomes available, I'm in. I would very happily do without the killing aspect of eating delicious animal protein.
Re:What's the point... (Score:4, Funny)
I'm a long term member of the other PETA... People Eating Tasty Animals. And there is a place for many of nature's creatures; right next to the mashed potatoes and gravy.
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"Of course we serve vegetarians. What do you think cows are?"
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I grew up on a farm slaughtering animals. Only pansy-ass libtards get squeamish.
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Nobody who uses teenybopper words like "libtard" has ever been in the same area code as a live farm animal.
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Re: What's the point... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless you know what's going into the vat you can't say that for sure. Most likely something has to be done to stave off the molds, bugs and other vermin that is going to be on the factory floor and in the source product (given the source is plant material)
Keeping a lab clean is relatively easy, keeping an entire factory where food-products are grown and handled are going to attract something.
Re: What's the point... (Score:5, Interesting)
Keeping a lab clean is relatively easy, keeping an entire factory where food-products are grown and handled are going to attract something.
It's not going to be an open vat. It's going to be a closed reactor. Even fruit paste (you know, like what they make those little fruit filling cookies with... or fruit roll-ups) is cooked in a sealed system — it's vented, but it's not permitting unfiltered atmospheric air to mix with the fruit paste.
Re:What's the point... (Score:5, Interesting)
You dont really need to..
You can do things in a processing line you cannot do on a feed lot. (and vise versa.)
Feed lot: You can never keep it free of feces. The animals produce and exrete it in copious quantity. This creates an environment rife with dangerous microbes.
Processing line: No feces. At all.
Feed lot: You cannot keep it even 70% free for microbiota. It is open air, open environment. Germs from all over get all over it.
Processing line: Microbes only get introduced at inlets and places where there are breaks in the closed environment of the processing system. One can keep much the intake free from microbiota by keeping inlets heated above 250F, with a cooloff section before it gets to the main processing line. If your culture system involves cultured whole blood as well as meat on scaffolds, then you also get cultured white cells in the mix, meaning microbes in the line are less of a problem.
Keeping the goop from getting contaminated is less of a chore than keeping the system from plugging up though. Fibronectin and whole platelets in the system (if fed on cultured whole blood) will have the same trouble that artificial heart valves and artificial hearts have: getting coated in blood factors and then having blood and other tissues adhere there.
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Feed lot: You can never keep it free of feces. The animals produce and exrete it in copious quantity. This creates an environment rife with dangerous microbes.
Processing line: No feces. At all.
And no urine either. But don't assume that's good.
There is no liver and kidneys that remove bad substances from the body. The cells stew in their own filth.
With no immune system to take care of the infection vectors like your dangerous microbes.
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With no immune system to take care of the infection vectors like your dangerous microbes.
If something goes seriously wrong with the proteins in a cow's muscles, it dies. Probably before it is even born. If something goes seriously wrong with the proteins in a vat of meat and they don't detect it, you die.
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Farming is labor intensive and requires land, while any automated industrial process, once developed, can be scaled up to meet the market. Watch for lab-grown meat to take over first in the places where the human population is most dense.
Re:What's the point... (Score:4, Interesting)
Because you have to put a lot of perfectly good food into those animals to get far less food out of them.
Current meat production practices are unsustainable when expanded to a global scale.
So unless you want to maintain the first-world/third-world gap, meat production or consumption has to change.
Since we all know the latter is not going to happen any time soon, we need to tackle the former.
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If you live in a country where your average citizen is making oh...$900USD per year, at $12/lb this "vegan" meat seems like something you totally wouldn't buy. I mean, not when you can get meat from a cow @ $4/lb or @ $2/lb from a chicken.
At some point economy of scale and competition may make soylent-meat cheaper but right now it really only makes sense for people who have ethical problems with
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At some point economy of scale and competition may make soylent-meat cheaper but right now it really only makes sense for people who have ethical problems with eating delicious animals, not people in the third world who just want to eat something besides relief agency rice and oppression.
Currenty, you are absolutely right.
It's like the earliest hybrid/electric cars (remember the first Tesla, The one based on the Lotus frame?); way too impractical and expensive as a viable solution for the majority, but good enough for enough people to make it possible to build up the economy of scale you need for mass market adoption. We're still not there yet, but I dare say that few would be blind enough not to deny a future of non-petrol cars.
You can bet that the first few artificial meat products will b
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Because you have to put a lot of perfectly good food into those animals to get far less food out of them.
This is why most of the world eats a lot of goat. It can eat stuff we can't. Anyone care to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation of what switching 100% from cows to goats eating Kudzu would do to CO2 emissions?
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Here's the point... (Score:2)
You're an animal. A perfectly good one. Made out of food. But we don't eat you. Why? Because we respect the life and potential and feelings you represent, and find the idea of causing you pain, or harm, or loss of life, to be repugnant.
Some of us extend that to other animals. Consequently, we don't want to eat those other animals any more than we want to eat you.
For us, "clean meat" as TFS has it, is very welcome.
S
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The point starts with vegans that can't see themselves eating meat due guilt etc etc etc..
But then MCDonalds takes over, discovers how to make those huge meatplants that create the cheapest,greasiest and most addictive artificial groundmeat they can and have those massive machines that requires no farmers, no cow or advanced infrastructure. Direct from the tube to your burger.
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Hmm...I guess that makes sense.
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They're not even useful for beef farming, as they're different varieties.
That depends on what you mean by "useful". They're certainly useful enough that countries that use the same cattle for dairy and meat production do so.
Dual purpose cattle may not be as economically profitable as specialization, but a NRF steak is certainly tastier than Angus or Belgian Blue.
Re:What's the point... (Score:5, Informative)
The first vat-grown hamburger cost $325,000. The cost is now about $12 per pound [nextbigfuture.com]. That is a decline in price by a factor of 30,000 in four years. Progress happens.
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Cows consume grass -- and in very high volumes.
Not American cows. They eat grain, lots of it. And probably washed down with 32oz cups of HFCS.
Re:What is the meat "eating"? (Score:4, Interesting)
cows can produce it all from a few plants,
No, there are lots of things cows cannot make from plants. That's why they have 4 stomachs, where they get a lot of help from a bunch of microorganisms to do all the hard work for them.
as you can get everything you need from a varied vegetarian or vegan diet.
Deficiencies in vitamin D, calcium, iron, zinc, and especially B12 are pretty common among strict vegans. And that's just the obvious things we know. To get enough B12 as a strict vegan, you basically need supplements, as it is not naturally found in plants. For the other nutrients, you need to spend considerable effort to get a diet that's balanced and varied enough. Just for a fun challenge: try to come up with a vegan menu that contains all nutrients that you can find in a 1 oz serving of liver (that's one good bite)
Memphis Meats (Score:2)
I'm totally going to try this stuff, but I think I'm going to call it decepticon meat instead.
Perhaps Seth Brundle can help with the coding (Score:2)
so the computer can understand what meat is.
Did you know (Score:5, Funny)
dyslexic jihadists get 27 vegans.
Not real meat (Score:4, Interesting)
Superficially it will look like meat, but when you study the details, I'm sure you'll find plenty of differences. The chemicals that make up a piece of steak, for instance, are not all made locally in the muscle that it's cut from. For instance, the iron comes from red blood cells that are made in the bone marrow. The B12 vitamins are made by bacteria in the gut of the animal. Other things are made in the liver, spleen, gut, kidneys, and even the skin, and all transported through the bloodstream, where they infuse the muscle. Other things come the animal's food, or are made by microorganisms that form a symbiotic relationship with the animal. For instances, cows can survive on grass, but grass contains very little protein. The cow's stomachs work as fermentation tanks, using fungi and bacteria to create proteins (among other things) from grass. If you do a chemical analysis, you'd probably find thousands of different chemicals, made in different places. Some of these chemicals may be vital for our health. Some of them, we haven't even identified yet.
The problem with "fake meat" is that all these nutritional deficiencies are hidden. People just a piece of meat by taste, smell, and texture, not by availability of nutrients. At the same time, the industrial producer is only interested in profit, so they have every motivation to cut corners and produce a cheap but tasty piece of food, with little regard for nutrition.
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Superficially it will look like meat, but when you study the details, I'm sure you'll find plenty of differences.
I entirely agree. At the end of the day, it'll be a completely different product, but it will be able to carry the "meat" branding. A far better use of money and resources would be to do better branding around current meat alternatives like Seitan and Tempeh, which are often an already excellent substitute for lower quality meat like in chicken nuggets and the like. A good Ad Campaign making these meat alternatives mainstream would go a lot longer distance.
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On the other hand, we have people who are currently subjecting themselves to be lab rats, testing whether we can survive without meat. There are actually quite a few doing a long term study, even, who have not been eating meat for years now (and counting), and it should be possible to observe in them whether not eating meat is going to be viable or if we have to add certain nutrients to a meat-deprived diet.
If these people (IIRC that test group is called "vegans") manage to go for, say, 30-40 years without
Re:Not real meat (Score:4, Interesting)
If these people (IIRC that test group is called "vegans") manage to go for, say, 30-40 years without meat and don't show any signs of malnutrition, I think it's safe to say that this artificial meat is not going to mean any loss of valuable nutrients if we replace animal-grown meat with this vat-grown variant.
But that's not what happened. Vegans are so at-risk from malnutrition that even vegan and vegetarian sites have to include articles on how to avoid it, which is much more difficult if you don't eat meat.
Re:Not real meat (Score:5, Informative)
On the other hand, we have people who are currently subjecting themselves to be lab rats, testing whether we can survive without meat.
Hardly lab rats. A sizable percent of India (the world's most populous country) have been eating a vegetarian diet for centuries. The longest lived communities in the world all share a common trait: very little meat consumption.
It's not an experiment. You can survive without eating meat, and you will probably live longer if you don't eat much of it. It's not that we can't live without meat, it's that meat is tasty and we enjoy eating it.
I know less meat and more veggies is healthy for me, but I'm not giving up meat because I love meat.
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Little meat consumption is not no meat consumption. It could well be that we can survive on little but not on no meat, what then?
No, we need the data from those brave men and women risking their lives so we learn what additives we have to pump into the artificial meat.
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If you go to India you can find tens (hundreds?) of millions of people who have been vegetarian all their lives. Not strict vegan, but vegetarian. I think you will find that it is a perfectly normal and sustainable dietary regimen.
Excepting outliers like Eskimos or nomads that live almost exclusively on animal products, I suspect that for most of human history people's diets have been primarily vegetarian with sporadic meat consumption.
Sporadic meat consumption is probably enough for a bunch of trace nutri
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Most Indians do eat dairy products though.
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While all of that may be true, we have plenty experience making vitamin supplements and vegans/vegetarians make it without meat so they can't be all that essential. Hell, I hear some people live on Soylent. And then you have all the bacteria you don't want in there and the antibiotics they put in the feed. If they can grow pure meat in sterile lab conditions that tastes well at a reasonable price, I'm sure we can get the rest some other way. Like here you have refined sugar, almost pure carbs. Here you have
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There are plenty of stories in the news of kids from vegan parents suffering from malnutrition, even death. And some of the deficiencies could be very subtle, and develop over many years.
Poor nutrition is already costing us billions in healthcare. Just the cost of diabetes is over $250 billion per year, most of which could be avoided by better food.
I agree we have the capability to come up with a fake meat product that is just as nutritionally good as real meat, but there is no incentive for the producer t
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It's hard to NOT get the nutrients you need from a plant based diet
Provably untrue. Where would you get your vitamin B12 for starters ?
It's probably easier to suffer malnutrition from eating too much meat rather than not eating any meat.
Unlikely. Meat is very filling. Protein digestion is rate limited.
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No, the iron in meat, and its red color, is from myoglobin, made locally in the muscle cells. The blood is drained during butchering, and growing muscle cells aren't gobbling up red blood cells to get their iron. Iron endocytosis is mediated by transferrin.
Thanks for the correction. Nevertheless, transferrin is made in the liver, not in the muscle, so the overall point still stands.
If a substance doesn't kill you right away and tastes good, people will eat it.
That was my point. However, that doesn't mean it's good for long term health. Trans fats also taste good and don't kill you right away. They do kill you 25 years down the road.
Vegans will not eat this, but no problem (Score:2)
The big misconception going on here is that Hampton Creek is developing lab meat for vegan consumption. Actually this will be a totally different market, sold first to environmentally conscious meat eaters and then, as the process scales up and comes down in cost, as a replacement for meat in the regular marketplace.
Vegetarians might eat lab meat because their objection to meat is specifically the idea of killing for it, but veganism is a religious movement that is going to automatically reject it as being
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So as long as it tastes as crappy as the current meat "replacements" it's ok, but as soon as the artificial meat is on par in taste, texture and everything with the real deal it's verboten?
Yup, sounds like a cult.
In the meantime, I'll go to the vegan restaurant near my apartment, they have an awesome tofu based roast that tastes just like pork but can (by definition) not be stringily.
A lot of people are about to get sick (Score:2)
Start ups and the good old Pump N Dump (Score:2)
Short Story - Food of the Gods. (Arthur C Clarke) (Score:2)
It's only fair to warn you, Mr. Chairman, that much of my evidence will be highly nauseating; it involves aspects of human nature that are very seldom discussed in public, and certainly not before a congressional committee. But I am afraid that they have to be faced,; there are times when the veil of hypocrisy has to be ripped away, and this is one them.
You and I, gentlemen, have descended from a long line of carnivores. I see from you expressions that most of you don't recognize the term. Well, that's not
Gross (Score:2)
No, fake = fake, meat = meat. (Score:5, Insightful)
Calling it fake meat would be inaccurate. Soy deli slices are fake meat. This would be meat, just not from an anaimal.
As for "if you dont eat meat why eat this?", anyone who doesnt eat meat because they have an ethical issue with killing an animal but still enjoys the taste and values the level of nutrition provided by meat would be very interested in this.
On top of that, there are many of us who love eating meat but recognize that it's a very inefficient means of making food in a world where food and water scarcity is becoming more and more of an issue and who believe this could be a great way to get meat with less resources used.
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If you can grow animal flesh without growing a whole animal, what makes it not animal flesh?
It's not that it's not flesh, it's that there's no animal. It's not animal flesh. It's vat flesh.
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Since this is
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They aren't calling it fake meat because it's not fake meat. It's fucking meat. It's just grown in a lab instead of inside an animal.
It's tissue, not meat. Meats are tissue, but not the other way around.
We're nowhere near telling new cells what kind of cells they should grow into. It's a grail of embryonic stem cell research, but for now, what we can grow in a vat will be undistinguished purposeless cells that aren't more similar to muscle tissue they are to intestinal tissue.
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It's meat, as in, muscle tissue. It's almost certainly not grown from embryonic stem cells, but rather already differentiated muscle stem cells. Also, we can tell embryonic stem cells what to become:
https://www.google.ca/search?q... [google.ca]
The holy grail is being able to take an adult, fully differentiated cell, and turn it into a stem cell, in a simple way that doesn't involve potentially dangerous and imprecise viruses or gene editing.
Re: Corruption of vegatarian/vegan philosophy (Score:5, Interesting)
People are vegan for different reasons. Some are vegan for health reasons, Some are vegan for the environment, but most are vegan because they are against killing animals that feel pain.
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That's true, but the ones objecting to mayonnaise are not going to be of the pragmatic sort.
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but most are vegan because they are against killing animals that feel pain
[Citation needed]. Of all my vegan friends none of them give a shit about animal killing. Perceived health reasons seem to be the number one reason I have witnessed, but I'm happy to be proven wrong by a study.
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Citation provided - the definition of the Vegan Society, who coined the term in 1944 states:
"Veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose."
https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism [vegansociety.com]
Veganism is better described as a philosophy, or a mindset. If someone is eating vegan food only for health reasons, then they technically aren't vegans but 'strict vegetarians
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Huh? They coined the term in 1944. This is the group that invented the term 'vegan'. It didn't exist before they made it up. This is where veganism started, generally credited to Donald Watson (and his wife) in the UK. Do a little research, just because you haven't heard of something doesn't mean it isn't known by others.
People like you think that it's just some random word, and define it as they want, but that's not what history dictates. Ask any other significant vegan organization where the term came fro
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People are vegan for different reasons. Some are vegan for health reasons, Some are vegan for the environment, but most are vegan because they are against killing animals that feel pain.
Actually I think you mean this:
... but most are vegan because they are crazy.
I've known vegetarians who fit your reasons, but vegans are basically vegetarians' crazy cousins who nobody wants to talk about. People rarely become vegan because they are against killing animals. They'd be vegetarians in that case. They become vegans because they've gone off the deep end of the non-meat eaters segment of people.
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Today its about protecting animals.
There are judges in Europe who are calling them "people".
There are science fiction shows where "Holograms" and AI are called people.
After AI, ordinary rocks and ideas will be considered people.
Eventually everything will be "protected" equally in that nothing will be protected.
If AI or holograms can suffer and feel pain then why shouldn't it be protected? The new show Westworld is exploring some of that. At one point slaves were considered "just animals" and were treated like animals. How much protection different animals should receive is debatable. We have plenty of laws already making it illegal to abuse dogs and cats and what constitutes abuse. We have ethic boards which decide which experiments are ethical and which are not whether it includes humans or other animals.
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The real point of vegetarianism/veganism is to live in harmony with the Earth, reducing your consumption of energy by choosing the simplest path available to sustain yourself.
Do vegans/vegatarians think that predatory animals are not living in harmony with the Earth ?
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... still torturing and exploiting the device of life in an artificial situation. The real point of vegetarianism/veganism is to live in harmony with the Earth
So they're pissed about the Neolithic Revolution, too, I assume?
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1) You don't get to tell other people why they act the way they do. Different people are vegetarian for multiple reasons - health, moral, and simply taste preference are common reasons in addition to the incredibly smug reason you proclaimed. Your attitude is a stereotype that many vegans despise.
2) You are describing a minimalist stoicism, not vegetarianism.
3) Growing meet in a lab is still better for the environment than doing it on the hoof. Brains, bones, hooves, hair, organs, etc are all nutr
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Re: Silicon Valley is the new Wall Street (Score:2)
I had the idea for this shit first -- I should have started a company back then and got VC money ... Oh well. I even posted a comment on slashdot https://m.slashdot.org/story/6... [slashdot.org]
Scroll to the bottom and click load more then search for the word steak or back slashdot.
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Those essential amino acids are plentiful in high-protein plants like legumes, nuts, seeds, and grains. There's no single plant that will provide you will all of them, but it's really easy to pick a combination of two that will, usually a grain and a legume, or a nut and a seed. That's why large swaths of the world, most of whom are too poor to afford meat, live off staples like rice and beans. Be it the rice and pinto beans of Latin America, the rice and soy beans of east Asia, the wheat and garbanzo beans
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look at our bodies, we are not natural-born hunting machines
Well trained humans are among the best long distance running animal in the world, especially in the heat. By chasing down an animal, until it's overheated and completely exhausted, you can kill it with simple tools. Some tribes still use the technique:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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It is also not necessarily efficient because it very well can be that more calories were burned running, than a dead animal can provide.
Humans are not carnivores, fruits, roots and seeds were an important part of human diet - at least 50%.
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it very well can be that more calories were burned running, than a dead animal can provide.
No way. That animal weighs about 250 kg, and will easily provide 125 kg of edible meat, at about 3000 kcal/kg. I'm guessing the 8 hour run would cost somewhere between 3000 and 6000 kcal, depending on how fast he was going.
Humans are not carnivores
Humans are omnivores, eating both meat as well as plants, roots, nuts, and seeds. Meat is high in calories and high in nutrients, and it's much easier to get all your essential nutrients from meat.
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You assume that a sole hunter would hunt one animal for himself only. This assumption is false and an animal as large as you describe would give a sole hunter the finger. You also assume that the hunter would be able to find and kill a large animal every day, which is even more ridiculous
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You assume that a sole hunter would hunt one animal for himself only
No I don't.
You also assume that the hunter would be able to find and kill a large animal every day.
No I don't.
Lean meat is certainly not high in calories
I never said "lean meat", I said "meat". The kudu in the video isn't just lean meat. It's the whole animal.
Re:I have a better idea (Score:5, Interesting)
You assume that a sole hunter would hunt one animal for himself only. This assumption is false and an animal as large as you describe would give a sole hunter the finger. You also assume that the hunter would be able to find and kill a large animal every day, which is even more ridiculous.
The typical size of a hunting party is 3-4 men. So at 125*3000 ~ 375.000 kcal/kg per carcass out of which the hunters would consume 9000kcal/kg to recoup the 8 hour run there is plenty left over for the rest of their group. The average size of a hunter gatherer band can range between ~12 to 50 individuals. If we assume a meat consumption of one kilo of meat per day for each individual in a group of 30 hunter gatherers, one carcass like that would last them for four days. However, a group of 30 would easily be able to field two hunter teams of 3-4 men each (or women, since women hunted in some of these societies) with, one group hunting and one either preparing for a hunt, or inbound with a carcass. At the same time these 6-8 people are out hunting the rest of the group would be out gathering fruits, vegetables, seeds roots herbs to supplement the diet and easily matching the contribution of the hunters while others are making equipment, clothing shelters etc... in short religionofpeas numbers seem perfectly plausible to me, especially since hunter gatherers ate every scrap of the animal down to the offal and the marrow in the bones and then used inedible parts including bones to make arrowheads, harpoons spear heads, knives and sinew to make rope, thread and as a component in bow making. Leather of course would not have been wasted either nor would horn or the wool of the animal if any. Many apex predators leave that stuff behind, a large animal killed by humans was likely to completely disappear simply because every bit of it's carcass was used up for some purpose.
Lean meat is certainly not high in calories and humans can only metabolise a few hundred grams of protein per day without getting problems with their health. Ever heard of "rabbit starvation"?
I think that if hunting was an inefficient activity humans would not have continued doing it for millions of years. Rabbit starvation is also one of the reasons why the women would be out gathering fruits, vegetables, seeds roots herbs to supplement the diet while the hunters were doing their thing. There is a good reason why hunting and gathering is a package deal. I live in a region where there are still aboriginals who largely live off of hunting and let me tell you something, these are supremely practical and no-nonsense people who would not bother with hunting if meat was not a viable source of nutrients. They certainly would not hunt animals purely for the fun of, many of them still pray for the spirit of the animals they kill.
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I think that if hunting was an inefficient activity humans would not have continued doing it for millions of years.
Exactly. And if you look at our physical differences with other great apes, pretty much everything you see makes us better (long distance) runners. Humans have lost most of their body hair, to make sweating more effective. We have less muscles overall to save weight and increase flexibility, efficient bipedal motion, bigger buttocks, more flexible neck, and long tendons to act as springs to store energy. This suggests that persistence hunting was not a fad. It was a major phase in our development as a speci
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But current research indicates that humans burn appr. the same amount of calories doing nothing or performing intensive ways of obtaining food. This was tested in current hunter/gatherer societies. So, yes, it is worthwhile doing this.
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But current research indicates that humans burn appr. the same amount of calories doing nothing or performing intensive ways of obtaining food.
Not really. Doing nothing burns about 2000 kcal/day. Top athletes can burn up to 1000 kcal/hour.
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Not just top athletes. A 90 kg man running at a slow to medium pace will burn around 1000 kcal/hour.
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Not really. Doing nothing burns about 2000 kcal/day. Top athletes can burn up to 1000 kcal/hour.
Your logical fallacy is moving the goalposts. A lot of the time spent "hunting" is actually spent sitting still. And meat is so energy-dense that you don't necessarily need to do it every day.
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Well, we're looking at a serious problem: Growing meat is expensive. Less so in terms of money, but in terms of energy. Animals waste a lot of the precious energy we pump into them to live rather than to grow meat. Unfortunately animals need to live to grow meat. Classic catch 22.
If we find a way to create meat in a way that consumes less energy than it takes to grow meat in animals, that's a huge step forward. Simply because more and more people want (and can afford) to eat meat. And we simply cannot produ
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While we did evolve to eat meat, we weren't designed for it. We could change our diets, adapt to the new conditions, and eventually evolve to be efficient without eating meat.
I have no plans along these lines, but it could be done.
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Shhh, you're giving away our devilish master plan!
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Maybe you should realize that _good_ quality "artificial" meat could have many benefits for normal people? There could be reduced costs, reduced environmental impact and better control of meat properties.
In theory that is. To reach the point where factory grown meat can have those qualities there is a need for research, if anybody want to eat the expensive _bad_ quality meat possible to produce now so that everyone can benefit in the future I'll applaud those heroes!